


there's magic in the night

by gaywaydrug (breathless_bisous)



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Grace centric, also i made up her whole family sorry not sorry, also rampant alcohol abuse, cw for eating disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 03:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10585359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathless_bisous/pseuds/gaywaydrug
Summary: still, frankie did have funny habits of judging spelling bee contestants and buying seventeen cans of whipped cream and nothing else, and sitting on the beach eating bugles and describing to grace her worst sexual encounters, which grace had certainly not asked about, but which were amusing all the same.  that was it, frankie was amusing, funny in a way robert had never been.  fun to live with, even.  and the only one who really understood what it was like to wake up one day and find her life was not real anymore, who had the same strange aversion to seafood, who traded barbed remarks with her about their ex-husbands.





	

it had not occurred to grace that happy was something that people felt in a marriage.  her parents certainly hadn’t felt happy in their marriage.  separate bedrooms and too much to drink and cold silences and barely putting on a show in public because everyone knew that this was just what marriage was like.

well maybe not frankie and sol, but frankie and sol didn’t really know anything about anything.

grace was pretty confident that sol had to be the best divorce lawyer in the world for robert to put up with his constant need to talk things through and smoke pot and have long discussions (monologues, really) with grace about whether or not karma would bite him in the ass in the end.

grace didn’t really understand the last point anyway, but he always seemed to wind up there when he was drunk, touching her arm in a weird way, and repeating endlessly that he didn’t want to end up a caterpillar in the next life because of frankie.

she didn’t really understand why frankie was going to make him a caterpillar either, but she chalked it up to some weird hippie bullshit and moved on.  sol certainly wouldn’t be the type to have an affair, not with the way he looked at frankie like the sun shone out of her ass.  if anyone was having an affair it was robert, the way he never quite looked her in the eye.  she couldn’t complain, it wasn’t as if she was so faithful to him.

well, she didn’t sleep around, but she certainly thought about it a lot.

still, she and robert were well matched.  they had fun sometimes too, when it was them against the world (the world being frankie and sol high and trying to tell the kids about some weird mongolian tradition they all wanted to do as a group.)

they both understood what a marriage was like.  it was quite and non-committal and some basic companionship, but very little love, and almost no sex.

 

and then of course robert told her about all those years that he and sol were fucking and it made horrible, perfect sense then, oh, of _course_ , how he never seemed to mind at all when they lost a case because sol was on some righteous crusade (though he did seem to win quite a few of them as well, to his credit.  robert wasn’t that stupid, to throw away his livelihood, at the very least.)

no she wasn’t angry that she’d had to put up with frankie and sol all those years so that robert could maintain his straight façade (well okay, a little bit.)

she was mad because all those years he had gotten to love someone, be happy, be safe and warm and not married, and she had sat at home in that big awful house watching brianna and mallory and building ‘say grace’ without ever once considering that maybe there was something out there that she could have, something tangible and good.

 

she didn’t begrudge him being gay, not really.  everyone from their set had had _something_ back when they were young.  she had kissed the girl who lived three doors down from her at wellesley in 1964, had shared a little smile with her during particularly boring events that she just had to go to, the way they had all had to just do some things.  looking back, it was the same kind of smile she had shared with robert, a little bit mocking, a little bit dry, a little bit boozed up.  though he had always had an edge of fondness, of indulgence for their victims (of course he had, he was fucking one of them for christ’s sake.)

well regardless, everyone had done something like that, but of course it was something you grew out of.  you married nice boys from princeton, and then sat in that horrible cold silence, and then moved out to california, away from your mother and father and their bar cart, and their general dislike for your first born, who always was a little too rambunctious, and probably reminded them of your sister, pregnant at seventeen and never mentioned again.  of course that was back before the pill, not that mother and daddy needed to know brianna was on the pill.  not that they were particularly interested in any of the details of her family.  a tangent, anyway, just a note on a particularly annoying habit they had of judging her children, who weren’t quite together but weren’t so awful either, just a little snide and a little rebellious, and importantly, hers.  she had born them (in awful, wrenching pain that robert had sat outside the room for) and loved them, and so she wasn’t so great at telling them so, but it was true all the same.

 

regardless, mother and daddy were her first home, and her second one wasn’t shaping up to be particularly friendly either, so she felt a little bit of a pang when she flew across the country, despite her instinctive loyalty to her children.  though that pang was quickly smoothed over like every other pang had ever been (except for maybe the one on her wedding day, but that had been nerves and had only lasted another two weeks.)

besides the familiar pain and fluttering in her chest were mostly smoothed over by her idiot psychiatrist who said she was both anxious and depressed (like grace didn’t know exactly how to get him to give her what she wanted.  she hadn’t really lied at all even and he had still bought her sob story.) and basically handed over a blank prescription pad.

pill bottles piled up in the california medicine cabinet like they never had at home, with mother and daddy hovering over, so anxious that their _good_ child would never go to one of those crazy doctors.  well fuck them very much, because she wasn’t crazy at all, she just knew good drugs when she saw them, and how to take advantage of that kind of a thing.  she wasn’t in therapy or anything like that, she was too strong to need that kind of bullshit.  only weak miserable people went to therapy, or people like frankie and sol, who seemed to love indulging in whatever passing emotion had caught them.

 

well anyway, robert and sol ruined her fucking life, and so she moved into that beach house with frankie (who was still annoying as hell, by the way, though without sol there to egg her on seemed much better than grace remembered) and it really wasn’t all that different.  i mean, it’s not as though her home with robert had been some romantic paradise, so living with frankie was just some persistent thorn in her side, a louder version of those tiny petty things which had driven her crazy when she lived with robert, like him expecting dinner every night even though they both worked, or never doing the dishes, or having those secret talks with _her_ children that she was never privy too.

well frankie didn’t do the dishes ever either, and she left acrylic paint marks in the shower, and speaking of the shower, had a tendency to just walk right in to the steamy bathroom and start talking to grace through the glass partition as if she wasn’t _naked_.

but she didn’t hole herself up in her study and only speak to grace when brianna and mallory were there, so there were somethings that she did better than robert at the very least.

though she did have a tendency to harp on about grace “drinking too much” and “ignoring how she felt” and “not treating herself with kindness,” whatever that meant.  robert had never insisted on that, had left her to her company and her martinis and her (what did frankie call them? “self-destructive?”) habits.  never watching over her shoulder, bothering her to eat.  that empty house had never once lectured her on her grapefruit, oatmeal, salad, salad practice.  she admits that on the not so good days she had filled in gaps with coffee, but the empty house didn’t seem bothered in the slightest.

still, frankie did have funny habits of judging spelling bee contestants and buying seventeen cans of whipped cream and nothing else, and sitting on the beach eating bugles and describing to grace her worst sexual encounters, which grace had certainly not asked about, but which were amusing all the same.  that was it, frankie was _amusing_ , funny in a way robert had never been.  fun to live with, even.  and the only one who really understood what it was like to wake up one day and find her life was not real anymore, who had the same strange aversion to seafood, who traded barbed remarks with her about their ex-husbands.

not that mallory and brianna hadn’t tried, but it was one thing to hear a horrific experience and quite another to live it, and even though they were good girls and good to her, mostly, they had always loved robert just a little bit more, and the righteous anger had faded quite quickly for them.

grace kept it alive, simmering inside her for the next three years, never boiling over, but never forgetting all the years she had wasted as someone’s beard.

well, whatever, frankie was not so bad to live with and she somehow had become important to grace, a natural part of her life, like skipping lunch or drinking her morning coffee out on the back patio, watching the sun rise and reveling in being alone without feeling lonely anymore.

 

guy was a nice distraction, and a nice ‘fuck you’ to robert as well, but he wasn’t so very interesting once you got past the whole cannibalism thing.  not anything really, and within a few weeks she forgets it ever even happened.

 

of course, time moved on and she and frankie seemed to come closer and closer every day, until grace started to fear that they might just meld together one morning, wake up for pancakes and realize they had fused together in the night, and she would really, truly, be stuck with frankie’s awful yodeling forever.

and now everything was messy, a little bit tearful and scared in a way she had never been before.  frankie had somehow, finally, after years of trying, unleashed the pandora’s box, the weird pain and fluttering, and new things as well, that feeling like a balloon was being blown up inside her, pushing up against her rib cage until it almost hurt and her mouth curving up despite herself, and almost getting teary-eyed over how happy she was, and it was simply ridiculous.

of course it unleashed something else as well, that burning feeling that consumed her, starting from the left side of her chest (where her heart is, she realized dully one day, curled up on the couch with a magazine while frankie spread crumbs all over their living room sofa) and expanding, expanding, expanding until it filled her whole body.   her body which always burned like that when frankie did foolish things, like keep almost dying or leaving, or when her voice went all cold and flat because grace had finally crossed a line, had forgotten that frankie wasn’t robert for a second, that she was soft and kind and had a _limit_.

it was all messy now, and she started taking some of those pills on a schedule, routine, with her morning fruit salad and right before she went to bed, instead of popping three whenever she had felt a little bit too much.

 

and then there’s phil, who might be the only man who she really did feel something for, even if had mostly been the need to escape to get away from anything and anyone, to go somewhere anonymous and loving, where she had been touched with soft hands, calloused but gentle, even if they never did _that_ , even if she could never quite cross that line, even if, in the end, robert had been too present in her life.  well fuck him too, him and his decades of an affair, she would get her dessert now, seventy-two and finally, finally, finally doing whatever she pleased.  she would get her dessert, except for phil had that wife, that pitiful wife, who she wanted to hate, she really did, but all she could feel was an overwhelming guilt.

she might understand sol’s whole caterpillar bullshit, though of course karma is hippie nonsense, and she knows, like any good presbyterian, that she’s just going to hell.

she walked away, though, and god had to count that for _something_ , anything really.  there had to be some justice in the world.

not that she and god had such a good track record.

technically speaking, though, she still said her prayers when she remembered too, even if it was lying down (but she’s old now dammit, and she can’t get on her knees anyway, so there) and manages to make it to church when she has a truly urgent or important request, so god still owes her something, frankly.

 

she goes on a bender, plunges her body into so much vodka she probably pickles her organs, until finally billie steps in and stops her, which is just as well, because having someone step in means she must be loveable enough that at least someone doesn’t want her to die, despite phil and his fucking wife and his fucking charming smile, and their fucking fantasy world together which has gone up in smoke because he hadn’t been able to convince her.

logically she knows that it isn’t his fault, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with being unlovable or even rejected, but she needs somewhere to place the blame for all those years in which she wasn’t anyone to anybody, especially not robert, except briefly phil, and she never got that anyway.

she doesn’t really mean to embarrass frankie like that.  it’s just that it was frankie who made this kind of thing happen, this kind of all out pain that causes her mouth to taste like someone who clearly has lived in a trailer at some point in his life (god she’s going to regret that one.)

she regrets the other one too, the one where she hurts frankie more than she thought she could hurt someone, the one where she calls her a failure, which isn’t even true, given that frankie has managed to do everything post-divorce better than she ever could, except maybe have sex first, but she’s not sure if it counts if the sex is bad.

she eats cake, which is horrible, but when she’s that drunk it almost seems ok.  maybe she should consider always drinking so much, just so she can eat wonderful things like cake without doing the math in her head.  not that it’s a problem for her, it’s just she knows people will get all up on their high horse if she says things like that, so she tries not to share those kind of details.  she also says some things about purging but since she wraps it up in hippie bullshit about feelings, she thinks maybe no one notices.  they never noticed back in the old house, and she can’t imagine it’ll be much different now. 

she’s wrong of course, because after they make up frankie insists on eating three meals a day with her, because, she says, she can’t cook for herself and she needs grace’s help.  it’s a load of horseshit, but grace does her best to eat anyway, because she knows how worried frankie is, deep down, and worrying frankie does a kind of unsettling thing to her stomach, a bit like drinking coffee on an empty stomach.  not that you can undue fifty-five years of a habit, but she makes an effort, at least.  less coffee, more oatmeal, which is pretty safe anyway.  besides, frankie has gotten less and less willing to take ‘i’m fine’ as an excuse for anything, which is remarkably unfair, in grace’s opinion.

and babe’s dead, and her ashes are everywhere, scattered all over that beach which had seen so much of grace’s life (not temporally, she supposes, but significant nonetheless) and grace feels as if everything might be a little bit ok now.

 

besides, she finally feels a little bit safe from robert’s reach when she pulls out those boxes and boxes of jewelry and lets out all that simmering anger (ok, not all of it, but enough of it that she no longer feels like a shell filled with steam and pressure and fury)

she doesn’t need to buy a gift for frankie anymore, not to say she’s sorry.  she does, of course, because sometimes she sees something that reminds her of her, and of course she always picks up bugles or donuts or something like that when she picks up groceries, because she knows frankie needs things like that around that house for whenever she feels a little too restless.  but she can almost say she’s sorry now for everything, not just getting drunk and telling jacob that frankie is too scared to have sex, but little things like always insisting that frankie make her bed until frankie finally tells her to just lay off already, she’s happy that way she is, and if grace really needs the bed made she can do it herself.  and grace says she’s sorry, and makes the bed herself because really, someone has to look after this house.

so maybe the whole feelings thing is sort of balanced out, just a little bit, because she can do things like that now, say sorry and thank you and really mean it, like she never did with robert.

 

vybrant picks up steam, and she and frankie are really stuck together now.  well maybe they were stuck together long before this, but now they’re financially stuck together, legally _stuck_ together.  so no more benders or other stupid shit like that, grace promises herself, because if frankie leaves that she’ll have no one and nothing, not even the most promising thing she’s done in thirty years.

 

after the burglary, she kisses frankie’s forehead and doesn’t correct the cop, and rubs frankie’s chest until she starts moaning and then grace stops because it’s all a little too confusing and things aren’t making sense anymore and grace hates it when things don’t make sense, which is why she has always been particularly averse to things like emotions which are messy and illogical and really will consume you.

frankie curls up in bed next to her, wraps her entire body around grace in that tactile way that frankie has, that way that no one grace is related to ever believed in.  she’s like a five foot eight hot water bottle, and she snores and mutters things in her sleep and grace can’t sleep so she’s just stuck there thinking about how weird it is to feel too hot in bed, to feel too crowded and annoyed by someone spreading themselves all over their bed.  _her_ bed, she corrects crossly.  it’s definitely time to send frankie back to her vindaloo and her weird alpaca wool throws.

 

she’s mad about the gun, and grace can’t understand why she can’t just let grace be.  frankie has never been good at letting grace’s little idiosyncrasies go, making horrible breakfasts and slipping the vodka to the top shelf of the freezer, and messing up her color coding just for kicks.  sometimes grace really has to fight the urge to just strangle her then and there, but there is the whole stuck together forever thing, so she has to let some of it go.

and her voice catches on “sometimes too much” and she’s not even really sure what it means, just that it’s there, pressing insistently on her, and she has to let it out somehow and this seems like maybe it won’t be noticeable, so she goes for it.  and sure enough frankie doesn’t notice, though she does catch her sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, staring at grace with a weird smile.

 

striking.  what does striking even mean?  it’s such a weird word to use, not that she expected anything different from frankie who likes to describe people (grace) as goddesses and tells people (grace) that they’re beautiful for no particular reason.  it was only really weird because she was lying on top of her at the time, frankie’s elbow uncomfortably lodged into her abdomen and their faces so close together that grace can smell her weird kombucha breath, though now that she thinks about it, kombucha really isn’t the most unpleasant flavor, compared to all those years that robert smoked cigarettes, much to sol’s chagrin.

besides grace is always saying weird things like that, like offering to go down on her or use their vibrators in the same room or occasionally placing a kiss on her shoulder when they’re on the couch together, frankie spread out across the couch but her head resting on grace’s arm, or right in the dip of her shoulder, which makes that irritating fluttering in her stomach come back, which the pills have mostly managed, but she must be forgetting to take them sometimes, because the fluttering has gotten stronger and stronger in the last few months.

 

the hot air balloon is stupid, and particularly stupid because she really thought that would decide it then and there, that frankie would say “of course, i never even considered it,” and they would just continue on like they always had.  but of course frankie doesn’t, she can’t be swayed by gifts (grace really thought she’d stop giving them, but she decides it’s a grand gesture instead, which is exactly was frankie always wants, some romantic thing that grace logically decided was simply unrealistic when she was fifteen.)

the hot air balloon lands on the top of that mountain as predicted and grace watches frankie watch the sun and earth and ocean spread out in the distance, and prays, really truly prays, to a god she maybe doesn’t believe in, because she is willing to try anything at this point.

 

god, for once in her life, comes through, and grace really goes to church every sunday for two months before she decides it’s simply unsustainable to keep that up.  but she does believe perhaps a little bit more, and she adds an apology into the occasional nightly prayer about not being on her knees, and does her very best to not present a defense every time she does it.

 

frankie’s college friend comes to visit, and frankie actually _cleans_ in preparation, which grace just can’t believe.  gertrude has a hideous name but when she shows up she’s beautiful, and grace instantly hates her.  grace always hates women who are prettier than her, especially when they won’t shut up about people who they knew fifty years ago, who are probably long dead anyway, and frankie eats it all up, as if she isn’t completely different now, as if college isn’t completely irrelevant now anyway.  it isn’t until she’s leaving, saying her goodbyes and promising to come by again before she dies, which makes frankie laugh and grace roll her eyes, that she turns and kisses frankie full on the mouth, and frankie kisses back, and they’re not kissing, it’s not like a _process_ , or anything, but it’s longer than a peck and grace doesn’t really know what to do, so she just averts her eyes and then nods a curt goodbye at gertrude, who seems completely unbothered by grace’s obvious dislike.

“what was that?” she asks at dinner that night, interrupting frankie’s rant about some twitter fight she’s in with some man who made the mistake of insulting del taco.

“what?” blinks frankie in surpise

“the kissing thing” grace says, looking down and poking her tiny bites of chicken aggressively.

“oh, we ended on good terms, but i think she always kind of carried a torch for me.  it’s probably the hair.” she takes a second to ponder it, “either that or she just misses my pot” frankie chuckles to herself and helps herself to more quinoa.  grace has to work through that one, making her way through all twenty mandatory chews of her bite of chicken (her compromise with frankie, and a little bit with herself) before it fully catches up with her.

“you _dated_ her?” she says, voice unnaturally high

“well, duh” frankie says, and launches back into her rant about @texas_boi who apparently is twenty-seven and obsessed with cattle, republicanism and luke bryan, whoever that is.

grace feels weird and unstable, as if the ground is splitting open and she has one leg on either side of the chasm and it keeps getting wider.  suddenly all of frankie’s comments about sleeping together and holding her and them living out their lives together feel different, like maybe she meant it.  and of course grace doesn’t think frankie has been living some weird predatory double life, but she does feel a little bit cheated, like she wasn’t given all the facts and now she has to fit new information into something she assumed was complete.  she watches frankie chuckle over her own witty (well witty to frankie at least) responses and frowns, trying to catch up on the years without this important detail, pulling out patterns she had missed before.  it appeared she had missed a lot.

 

she feels a strong urge to call her sister when she first realizes.  her sister who disappeared off the face of the earth when grace was fourteen, was sent off to some special school that lasted exactly nine months but who ran away at month five and probably went and married some dirty biker or something like that. hope would probably understand things like her smoking pot now and seeing a therapist (a thirty something woman with tattoos who keeps telling grace she really is depressed and that it’s ok, really, which grace doesn’t really buy for a second, but she likes telling her about all the annoying things frankie is doing anyway) and maybe possibly falling in love for the first time in fifteen, forty, fifty years.  she isn’t quite sure how the numbers add up, because she doesn’t know the new words that her kids can throw around with ease.  back when she was twenty you were just an invert, a cover of a pulp novel if you were one of those people who actually cut their hair short and moved to places like san francisco or the dirty, grim part of new york city, and never stopped what was just a temporary moment for grace.

well until now, but that’s just confusing and she wishes she had someone who had grown up with her, who had known her when she was little, really little, truly little, and then had disappeared for robert and phil and ‘say grace’ and her girls and all those details which had ended up in a big fat sum zero.

she wanted someone who knew her in _tabula rasa_ , not even fully formed, just a girl in a tree or some other core self that she’s covered up over the years.

well, hope died ten years ago, she finds when she really starts searching, she was survived by one child, a girl, who lives in new york city, and it’s foolish to fly all the way out there just because she keeps thinking stupid, stupid things.  so the hope thing dies, and she suddenly realizes that she might be really truly alone in all this.  her family won’t understand (well, maybe robert, but she decided almost immediately that she sure as hell wouldn’t ask him for advice on this one, and she’s not budging on that.) so she just has to figure it all out by herself.  which isn’t so new anyway, so at least there’s that consistency.

 

she adds it all up like sums, like she did in school.  one fear plus one relief plus one confused moment equals one potential truth.  except there might be a thousand and one potential truths, and she runs out of space in her notebook before she can list them all.  and a thousand potential truths presents a pretty compelling picture, even grace can see that.

 

the problem then is, what to do about it.  she writes out seventeen different pro/con lists for each possible scenario, and finds the results inconclusive.  but she’s struggling to ignore certain things now, like the way frankie’s eyes crinkle up in a smile when she comes home with the baker’s dozen from dunkin donuts, or the way she comes in with paint splattered jeans and when grace complains just strips right there, and laughs when grace rolls her eyes.  the kisses on her shoulder have started to burn, and she has to deal with it eventually, but grace happens to be an expert in avoiding issues, and she’s managed for almost six months when instead of kissing her shoulder, frankie leans over and kisses her on the mouth.  she tastes like pineapple and pot, which is a surprisingly pleasant combination, and grace’s brain has short-circuited enough that it takes her a full ten seconds to realize that frankie has kissed her, which doesn’t make any sense at all.

“huh” she manages, which is the least articulate grace has ever been in her life.  she clears her throat and tries again. “what was that?”

“i’m seizing the day.  carpet diem” she says

“carpe diem” grace corrects automatically, distantly

“yeah, whatever that is” frankie says it casually, but grace has lived with her for five years now, and she can recognize frankie’s ‘too casual to actually be casual’ voice and she feels that balloon in her rib cage again, swelling up until she thinks her chest might burst.

“i wish you would show this much initiative in cleaning the kitchen.” grace says, but it doesn’t really work because she’s still grinning stupidly, and frankie looks annoyed, but without anything resembling anger, like grace has done something foolish but predictable which has thrown them off and frankie is just going to correct their course.

“would it kill you to say something genuine right now?” she says, and grace feels stupid, because she blurred robert and frankie together for a second there, again, and forgot that frankie expects her to say those silly romantic things that robert never even wanted from her.

“i’m sorry,” she says, kissing frankie again, fleetingly, because she suspects the next part of her sentence is the most important thing she’s ever said in her life.  “i’ve been waiting a year for that.”  frankie raises her eyebrow, mollified, and grace adds, “actually i might’ve been waiting forever for that, but i wasn’t very good at putting it all together.”

“well, i’m glad you did.  i really thought we were going to talk about when writing out our assisted suicide pact, and that didn’t seem very romantic at all” frankie says,

“we will not have an assisted suicide pact” grace says firmly,

“well, if that’s what you want to believe.  personally i think babe was a genius and we should go out to the tune of ‘thunder road’.” frankie says, but she’s looking at grace and it’s too genuine, too loving, too much, and grace is afraid the balloon really might burst, so she looks away, and turns back to meerkat manor, which really is the stupidest show of all time, but frankie likes it, so.

so they’re going to live in this beach house, probably kissing and probably stuck watching animal planet, and probably selling a million vibrators or something like that, and probably doing their best not to drink so much (trying to do their best not to worry each other) and letting their weird dysfunctions knit themselves together and maybe having those brunches with the kids that she always hated with robert, and doing all the things she didn’t get to do those forty years in that horrible big, empty house, and she doesn’t even know how to contain it all so she turns up the tv and frankie just smiles into her shoulder, and presses a kiss there, and it doesn’t burn.

 

she can’t wait to tell robert and sol.


End file.
